Cleopatra, from a different point of view

Cleopatra was queen of a large, rich, highly sophisticated country for more than 20 years, yet almost everything we know about her comes from a legend created by her most deadly enemy, the Roman emperor Augustus.As author Stacy Schiff points out, it’s as if our only information about Napoleon came from 19th-century British historians: “She effectively ceases to exist without a Roman...

Mr. Franklin goes to Paris

The foreign aid provided by France during the American Revolution was crucial to the outcome of the uprising. French funds kept the Revolution alive. As Stacy Schiff points out in A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga were French. Four years later, when the British set down their muskets at Yorktown, they...

Portrait of a marriage

Anyone who has read Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita has probably wondered what Mrs. Nabokov thought about her husband's literary preoccupation with pedophilia. Stacy Schiff writes that Vera Nabokov was actually responsible for Lolita, in one respect at least: she saved the manuscript from the fire into which Nabokov was determined to throw it. Schiff writes that Lolita's survival "is...